Just so you know, the meeting hotel offers no rooms for Saturday night of the meeting. Not at any rate.

How could AAVSO choose to hold their main meeting at a hotel that refuses rooms to attendees weeks in advance? I've never heard of such a thing. I mean, it's a big world out there, with lots of hotels, but AAVSO had to choose this one?

...

EDIT 2 hours later: The hotel was not sold out, they simply said that they were. I won't insist on the word "lie", but you can decide. Expedia had a room for $110/night above group rate, and I took it. And then the same hotel desk confirmed the very reservation that they had refused me (after I waited on hold for half an hour just to hear it).

Now if the airlines treat me better than the Holiday Inn Vanderbilt has done, yay I may actually see you all in Nashville.

Thank you for letting us know that the reserved rooms have been booked. As our web page states, the meeting will take place on the Vanderbilt University campus (not in a hotel). We will post more details when we find out which university room is allocated to our meeting, along with a relevant campus map with directions. There are plenty of other hotels around campus; now that we know that our recommended hotel’s rooms are sold out, we will post a list of alternatives for our participant’s convenience.

Nashville is a very popular location, with events happening every weekend. Therefore, we urged our meeting participants to make hotel reservations as soon as possible. This is going to be another exciting AAVSO meeting and I am looking forward to seeing you all there. Eric, I hope you will be able to make it – it would be great to talk to you again in person!

Making hotel reservations earlier doesn't make the group room block larger--it simply shuffles which AAVSO members lose out.

And AAVSO chose a campus football weekend--hard to understand, which I said the moment I first heard of the choice. And if Nashville is really so non-stop popular, that simply begs the question: why in the world Nashville?

(Well, at least Nashville's closer than next year's perfidious Albion.)

I'm staying in Lexington at my daughter's place and driving to and from Vanderbilt for the meeting Fri and Sat. If anyone is staying west of Nashville (i.e. along I 40 toward Jackson/Memphis) and wants to carpool into the campus, let me know. I'm not attending the banquet on Saturday though. Email me at president@csastro.org if interested.

These days, you can spend more for a room to sleep for a couple hours than the roundtrip airfare from abroad! I remember my college days, you could drive across the country and stay in Motel6 for $12. This is progress???

You can hardly ever get the "great rates" advertised either. Sold out usually, or not available for weekends or other times you really need the place. Then, they add various "resort fees", "deposits", "key fees", "parking fees", "cleaning fees" (like you would stay in a room and never sleep in the pristine bed), "concessions taxes", "other taxes". What a racket. I thought they eliminated "the mafia"?

Quite seriously, you are far better off renting a car for $12/day, recline the seat, and snooze in Walmart parking lot :) Plus, that gives you freedom to go anywhere you want without paying the ridiculous cab fares these days too!

And yet year after year, SAS successfully gathers its members into one hotel for low cost--about a third of what I'll pay if I go to Nashville. SAS shows that it can be done. Practically all the members--several times more than attend AAVSO meetings--are in the same hotel so that I find myself in natural and constant contact with dozens of observers, all day and much of the evening.

No such opportunity accrues when sleeping in a car or when being told to "just find a different hotel" after I've traveled 1,000 miles specifically to be in the presence of other observers. Both miss the main point of a conference: contact.

I would gladly trade away any technical program of any quality in favor of a better chance--my only chance--to converse spontaneously with my fellow observers. "Observers" still forms the very name of our organization; "gala" and "headliners" do not.

But AAVSO's Nashville meeting is designed to scatter its members, crippling the main reason to attend. What a missed opportunity.